Bruce Jessen: The CIA Torturer in the Pulpit

by William Norman GriggAs a newly appointed ecclesiastical leader in Spokane, Washington, Bruce Jessen will have the opportunity to baptize new converts. He will also be expected to interview them regularly to evaluate their understanding of the church’s teachings and their fidelity to its precepts. Given Jessen’s background, the possibility exists that he might use the baptismal font as a theater for “enhanced interrogation” of those who give him unsatisfactory answers.

The approach devised and taught by Jessen was “based on coercive methods used by the Chinese Communist dictatorship to elicit false confessions from U.S. POWs during the Korean War,” explains a 2009 report by the Senate Armed Services Committee. The objective was not to obtain sound intelligence, but rather to destroy the detainee’s will.

“`Strip him,’ shouted Marwan. They cut off my clothes with some kind of doctor’s scalpel. I was naked. I tried to put on a brave face. But maybe I was going to be raped. Maybe they’d electrocute me, maybe castrate me. They took the scalpel to my right chest. It was only a small cut, maybe an inch. At first I just screamed…. I was just shocked…. Then they cut my left chest. This time I didn’t want to scream because I knew it was coming.”

Marwan, angered by the resolution displayed by the captive, ordered the fiend with the scalpel to “go ahead with the plan.”

“One of them took my penis in his hand and began to make cuts,” Mohamed recounts. “He did it once, and they stood still for maybe a minute, watching my reaction. I was in agony, crying, trying desperately to suppress myself, but I was screaming.”

This procedure was carried out dozens of times. One of Mohamed’s captors taunted him, suggesting that he should be emasculated since “I would only breed terrorists.”

The “scalpel treatment” was inflicted on Mohamed on a monthly basis, reports Stephen Grey in his book Ghost Plane. “It was carefully controlled, so the wounds would not be too deep and would not leave permanent marks. In the end, [Mohamed] told his guards: `I will sign anything, confess to anything.’”

To use Jessen’s terminology, Binyam Mohamed had been successfully “exploited.” For months his interrogators had demanded information about an American citizen named Jose Padilla, someone whom Mohamed had never met and whose name he had never heard. After months of being hung by his wrists, beaten with a leather strap, and having his skin flayed by experts, Mohamed finally provided the CIA’s surrogates with the “evidence” the Bush administration demanded.

Padilla, a former gang-banger with no operational connections to al-Qaeda, was labeled an “unlawful enemy combatant” – the first U.S. citizen thus designated – and confined to a military brig without legal recourse for roughly four years. During that time, Padilla received the full Jessen Treatment -- sensory deprivation, sleep disruption, stress positions, death threats, prolonged isolation in a medieval-quality cell. As noted in a lawsuit filed on Padilla’s behalf, the purpose of this regimen was “to destroy Mr. Padilla's ordinary emotional and cognitive functioning in order to extract from him potentially self-incriminating information.”

Despite the Bush administration’s insistence – buttressed by the “testimony” extorted from Mohamed – that Padilla was involved in a “dirty bomb” plot, he was never charged with that offense. In a Soviet-grade federal trial, Padilla was eventually convicted of conspiring to “support” terrorism abroad. The key evidence in that trial consisted of transcripts of innocuous conversations in which government “experts” claimed to find “coded language” regarding terrorist activities.

After Mohamed had signed a document implicating Padilla, he was sent to Guantanamo. During his flight on a CIA-chartered rendition plane, he was attended by an operative he described as “a white female with glasses.” When she removed Mohamed’s shirt, the CIA officer was horrified to see that most of his upper body was covered with scars carved out by the agency’s scalpel-wielding subcontractors.

Kiriakou, who is one of six officials being prosecuted by the Obama administration for “leaking” information about the government’s crimes, accepted a plea bargain because he has five children. That fact, to use Jessen’s terminology, made him “exploitable.” Accordingly, while the architect of the torture program will now hold forth from a pulpit, a whistleblower will spend at least two and a half years in prison.
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William Norman Grigg [send him mail] publishes the Pro Libertate blog and hosts the Pro Libertate radio program.

Morons are mormons. Well with wankers who carved out a cult and now have millions of illiterate zombies in their fold nothing good can come from this ill conceived marriage. Holier than thou white trash and one of the pack wants to run as President, what a hoot. I spit in your general direction SFB's.

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